Darkest Hour: positively Winston Churchill

A new film looks at Churchill the man rather than the leader.

Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour after four hours at the hands of a makeup artist.

For director Joe Wright, his new film, Darkest Hour — about Winston Churchill in the early years of World War II — is not a historical movie. He tried not to see it that way, at any rate.

“I tried to just see it simply as a story of a man whom everyone doubted, who came to doubt himself and then turns that doubt into something positive,” he says.

Anthony McCarten’s screenplay focuses on events beginning in May 1940, when Churchill ­became prime minister after ­Neville Chamberlain resigned.

He is a compromise candidate with a shaky hold on power. He presides over a war cabinet where many are advocates for a peace deal with Germany. His fellow MPs in the Conservative party are suspicious of him or ready to move against him.

This Churchill, Wright says, is very different from the figure he thought he knew when he was young. “Growing up in London, the abiding image for Churchill was the giant bronze statue in Parliament Square. He always felt kind of untouchable and one is brought up with the idea that he was such a flawless figure, the greatest Briton ever, that he never doubted his mission. What one discovers in looking at him more closely is that he was a deeply flawed person, like all of us. He made many, many mistakes, yet at this moment in history he was the right man for the job.

“And I find it really interesting that those characteristics of ours that can land us in terrible trouble are also our greatest attributes at times. His extraordinary will­power, for instance, which led to the disaster of Gallipoli, way past when that mission should have been abandoned, was also the willpower that led him to refuse in the end to back down and make a peace deal with Hitler. I found those kind of characteristics really interesting.”

Churchill is played by Gary Oldman, who undergoes a remark­able transformation with the aid of prosthetics and makeup.

“It was an amazingly close collaboration and I think we both saw Churchill the same way,” Wright says. There are familiar tropes in the portrait — cigars, whisky and a horror of single-space typing — but there are also more unexpected images of vulnerability and manic energy.

“This is my most male-centric film,” Wright notes. In movies such as Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina and Hanna — not to mention an episode of Black Mirror in which Bryce Dallas Howard faces social media igno­miny — women have been at the forefront.

The female characters in Darkest Hour are minor figures, ­although it is they who sustain Churchill: Lily James as ­Elizabeth Layton, his hapless secretary, and Kristin Scott Thomas as his long-suffering wife, Clementine.

In Darkest Hour, Wright says: “I was interested in trying to look at male relationships and how they’re built, and how men, ­especially British men, navigate the etiquette and awkwardness of male friendship.”

He’s talking, in this instance, about the relationship between Churchill and King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) as it plays out in the course of their weekly meetings. Oldman is a Churchill racked with uncertainty. Mendelsohn plays a monarch with a sceptical attitude towards his chief ­minister. Eventually, however, he comes around: there’s a moment during one of their encounters in which a flash of understanding passes ­between them, as Churchill talks about his childhood and his feelings about his father, who was “like God. Busy elsewhere.” These meetings were bound to have a frisson, Wright says. “Chur­chill’s mother was ­rum­oured to have had an affair with the king’s father, so their lives were entwined right from the ­get-go.”

He cast Mendelsohn for a couple of reasons, he says. “Ben, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the greatest actors around, and I want to work with great ­actors. I was also interested in the fact that he’s not British because anyone who’s British coming to that role would have brought a lot of baggage with them. And so I liked the idea of someone who had less of that preconceived baggage and was able to approach the king with fresh eyes.” The support of George VI, the film suggests, is important to Churchill at a ­crucial time.

Darkest Hour is one of several recent films in which World War II has been fought out on screen. They include Christopher Nolan’s immersive epic, Dunkirk; Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s witty comedy set in a propaganda film unit; and Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill, with Brian Cox in the title role as a leader consumed by memories of Gallipoli on the eve of D-Day.

Wright has tackled the era ­before, memorably, in his 2007 ­adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, which spans several decades and has at its centre a dramatic depiction of the evacuation of Dunkirk. It’s a five-minute tracking shot of chaos and confusion depicted through the ­experience of Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), a once-ambi­tious young man whose life has ­already been turned upside down by a wrongful accusation.

Darkest Hour, Wright says, is “almost like an extension” of the earlier film. “Atonement saw the same piece of time but from a different angle. Atonement was very much the people’s story of that moment, whereas this is about how those people got there.

“But also my father was born in 1906 and lived through the second world war, and that part of history has always had a kind of fascination for me.”

Oldman’s transformation is, understandably, a talking point. Becoming Churchill — with the aid of Kazuhiro Tsuji’s prosthetic makeup artistry — was a daily burden for the actor.

“It took four hours in the morning. He would arrive before anyone else and get into makeup, and by the time I got there he was already Winston. I didn’t really see Gary for three months during shooting. He kind of disappeared. Not that he’s one of those method actors who stays in character,” Wright adds hastily.

He thought the demands of this preparation might have had an ­impact on the film as a whole, he admits. “I was nervous that it would reduce my shooting time, but it didn’t, and Gary accepted the process with extraordinary grace.”

For Wright, Darkest Hour is also “a kind of love letter to London. It’s where I grew up, it’s where I live and it’s very important to me. And to the people who went through the war, be they the Elizabeth Laytons or the Robbie ­Turners or even the Winston Churchills.

“The sacrifices they made and the extraordinary resilience they showed in the face of ­terrible hardship, I find that to be very inspiring.”

Darkest Hour opens on January 11.